The present disclosure relates to digital circuits, and in particular, to digital multimodal multiplier systems and methods.
Digital circuits process logical signals represented by zeros (0) and ones (1) (i.e., bits). A digital multiply-accumulator is an electronic circuit capable of receiving multiple digital input values, determining a product of the input values, and summing the results. Performing digital multiply-accumulate operations can raise a number of challenges. For example, data values being multiplied may be represented digitally in a number of different data types. However, including different multipliers to handle all the different data types a system may need to process would consume circuit area and increase complexity.
One particular application where digital multiplication of different data types is particularly useful is machine learning (aka artificial intelligence). Such applications may receive large volumes of data values in a multiply-accumulator. Accordingly, such systems require particularly fast, efficient, and/or accurate multiply-accumulators capable of handling multiple different data types to carry out various system functions.